Tuesday, 6 May 2014

last minute script changes

First things first, this weekend was a bit nerve-wracking. I
realised the script I was using, while fine on the computer I’ve been using all
this time, was very invasive in that I needed to alter UTGame files for it to
work.

I got help from a lovely guy called Scott Baker. As far as I
understand, he used the platformer starter kit provided by UDK and cut out the
trimmings and adapted it to what I needed. If you go way back to the start of
this project, you’ll see I had a go at this kit at the start of the project but
found it too unwieldy to use but all those issues have been fixed.

So basically the problem with the old script was that I
couldn’t get it to spawn my character mesh unless I changed something in a
UTGame file. UTGame is the default game type for UDK so if I changed those
files that might cause problems for someone else down the line. It used scripts
to generate a player camera locked to the character and was a bit of a faff to
change.

The new script is self self contained. It also utilises
archetypes to generate the camera and the character, making it possible to make
some adjustments to things like angle and camera distance while in the editor.

The only downside is that the character does not seem to be
locked to its path, so if it bounces against an angled collision it is pushed
out of its path. But it’s a problem that’s easy to live with.